A Feast for the Eyes, and Food for Thought

If the $1,000-to-$2,300 price of seeing 2008 presidential candidates at fundraising meals gives you indigestion, two spendid events Tuesay at Town Hall Seattle will stimulate the mind.

Upstairs, at 7:30, wildlife photographer Florian Schulz will display the results of summers shooting up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains, from Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming all the way to the Yukon . . . and then to Denali National Park and the Alaska Range.

Recently, The Mountaineers published a display book by Schulz – Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam – which goes to the purpose behind the photographs. Along with North America’s leading wildlife scientists, Schulz is concerned that animal populations are being confined to “islands” of wilderness. Isolated populations tend to die out, witness the threatened grizzly bears of the Cabinet Mountains-Yaak River region in northwest Montana.

Schulz makes a passionate case for “connectivity,” that corridors connecting prime habitats be established. The case is also made beautifully, with grizzlies feeding amidst gold larches at British Columbia’s Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park, and a grizz grazing at Jumbo Pass in the Purcells — its habitat threatened by a massive proposed sky development.

The young German-born photographer is a delightful narrator who knows to make fun of himself. Admission is $5.

If you are more of an historical bent, historian Rick Atlinson is downstairs at Town Hall, taling about his book The Day of Battle on the largely forgotten Italian campaign of World War II.

Atkinson won a Pulitzer for his first war book, An Army at Dawn, on how the U.S. army found its legs fighting the Wehrmacht in Tunisia. The latest book has heroes — the foot soldier, Willie and Joe in the memorable cartoons of Bill Mauldin — as well as villains, generals who lived in luxury while sending their men over the top in the trenches.

With Eisenhower, Patton and Montgomery gone to supervise D-Day, U.S. forces were under the command of Gen. Mark Clark, a man whose egotism matched Patton and Monty combined. Clark even pondered opening fire on the British if that was required to beat them to Rome.

Ultimately, the Eternal City was liberated on June 4, 1944. Two days later, D-Day erased Rome from the headlines. And the German army retreated intact to fight tenaciously for another 10 months.

If you’ve ever heard a 10th Mountain Division veteran talk about this campaign, as have I, you’ll want to hear Atkinson.

Admission is also $5, or $2,295 less than either of Hillary Clinton’s fundraisers. Atkinson, too, goes on at 7:30.